


murky waters waiting to still

by cockcrow



Category: The Beginner's Guide (Video Game)
Genre: Depression, Mental Health Issues, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:13:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6291229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cockcrow/pseuds/cockcrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I admit, I am wrestling something. It comes and goes, but mainly it stays. Watching, restless. Each moment I breathe feels like my lungs are on fire, and that I can burst into flames any second. The looming moments creep up onto my shoulder watching with its fangs out waiting and waiting, and it drives me crazy, wild: spinning out of control off the railing into a pit of a Plutonian black. And, I head in so fast and quick and hastily that everything blurs around me, my head spins and twirls, my stomach protests with its disagreements, and my heart beats like how a rabbit's would.</p>
            </blockquote>





	murky waters waiting to still

I feel inadequate, lacking.

 

Please, please, please. Tell me how, let me into your secrets. How do you stay afloat, not sinking down trying to claw onto anything in your grasp to keep yourself upright and breathing. How can you not let everything die and shrivel around you while attempting to feel like you're flourishing, growing, rising. How do you manage to keep being you when it kills me to even be me? How can you figure out what the poison in you is and confront it when it hurts to even acknowledge the faults, flaws, vices in you. How, how.

 

I want– Need to know. I feel like I'm drowning in quicksand. Down, down, a spiral of nothingness. Less than zero, less than me, only a fraction of a particle. There is nothing of me, and a world and more in you. A world of stars, moons, planets, galaxies, gods, and infinitely more.

 

I admit, I am wrestling something. It comes and goes, but mainly it stays. Watching, restless. Each moment I breathe feels like my lungs are on fire, and that I can burst into flames any second. The looming moments creep up onto my shoulder watching with its fangs out waiting and waiting, and it drives me crazy, wild: spinning out of control off the railing into a pit of a Plutonian black. And, I head in so fast and quick and hastily that everything blurs around me, my head spins and twirls, my stomach protests with its disagreements, and my heart beats like how a rabbit's would. The black starts becoming me, and my insides bleed of emptiness, and I start becoming the dark, and it's an endless cycle of: black; charcoal; pitch; jet; black. A repeated mantra, and I'm spiralling down without any grace or subtlety. It's maddening to feel like you know everything about yourself when you don't know a single thing at all. It's terrifying to be in the dark, left out of the loop. It's a mind-numbing fear, one that stops a person in their tracks for years and years to come just waiting for it to end.

 

The emails. Oh, the emails. Pouring down in the inbox: shouts; yells; meaningless squabbles; concerned voices; angry ones too. Mixtures and combinations, a kaleidoscope. There are so many of them, but not enough good ones, not enough positives to cancel out the negatives. And there's only so much you can build yourself up on. Words– Words are powerful, or that's what they say. But they seem, feel like an excruciating nothing now. Like sand pouring along the sides of my fingers, like melting away into the vast ocean as a sinking man. I'm just an black hole: sucking; sucking; taking; devouring; grabbing onto whatever I can in my reach and letting it crumble into dust, into whatever I've built myself on. Into nothing.

 

I feel like I've let myself be exposed for far too long in the toxins of the brittle rays of a sullen sun where the vivid shadows are swarming the cold, neglectful edges of the light. I feel like my arms, legs, torso, head are slowly, piece-by-piece, breaking away into tiny, little worthless thing easily disregarded like specks of dust. I feel, and feel, but sometimes I don't feel. sometimes, I don't get to feel a single thing: not an emotion; not the cold; not anything. Like as if my senses all shut down in spite of all the everything I felt before. My ears are ringing, and I let myself feel the waves of them. Swarming, drowning, wrapping their harsh, swift arms around me dragging me down. Sometimes, it's hard to stay afloat and breathing.

 

Now, I know I took away your walls, stripped them away one-by-one letting the rubble lay waste on the ground while I tried to shine the cold, distant light from my end to your world, and when I kept going and going and going and showed no signs of stopping, you broke off contact, everything. Maybe, that's when I started to break into shards of me like a shattered mirror. Maybe, that's when my eyes started to notice things that I glossed over with a shiny, false gleam when I had my head in the clouds by people's impressed, enthralled looks.

 

It's easy to misinterpret something, maybe even vital things. It's easy to go along with people's opinions when they're in the majority. But, it's hard to, suddenly, be stripped away of the security of a false warmth to realise I've spoken of lies and deceits. I feel best when I connect to others, so I added these wild stories, theories, concepts together, from your games, that built up into you. You became a story I could read and figure out and analyse. You became familiar to me like the alphabet, like numbers. And then, and then, I didn't know you. You became like a variable, forever changing, unknown. My lamppost flickered off, and its light was killed leaving me without that cold, distant glow, and into the ebony.

 

I like the concept of a destination, like that everything from the beginning to end is intertwined in some way even if random events occur. I like when messy thoughts, things become clean, concrete, cohesive, connected by some random aspect from the story, so maybe, that's why I added lampposts, that's why I spoke of these expressive, fluid, dynamic stories to everyone I showed your games to. Maybe, I should've realised that I was ruining everything. Maybe, I should've been the one to break off contact. Maybe, maybe.

 

If everything I've known is a lie, then what do I do? You seemed as if you had the world mapped out in front of you, and you had an exact time and date of everything you planned to do with the precise details of your surroundings and your actions. I had nothing of the sort, I spent my time looking at your games searching for anything I had missed from them, trying to create even more stories to go along with them. The worthless endeavour to all endeavours. I stopped looking at my games, and poured my attention into yours.

 

My soul feels like it wants to collapse into itself, like I want to just suddenly vanish into thin air so no one can look at me, so no one can judge me for the flaws and mistakes I'm stained with. Implode. I can't stand being here knowing I'm defective and that I cannot help anyone, help myself. I can't stand dealing with the silence of my home, I can't, I can't, I can't.

 

My words feel like a vinyl record repeating the same acidic words all over again so I can hear the hauntings of them at every tick-tock of the clock. I am worthless, I am a zero, I am nothing, I am made of the void and shadows, I am a wildfire consuming everything in my path leaving nothing unscathed. The same, old words, the same, old feeling, but the constant raw, consuming pain that overwhelms me at every turn feels so fresh, and vivid, so sobering.

 

My dreams are no longer dreams, not even nightmares. My slumbers are fraught with the pitch black. Like I'm in this cold, damp cave with no light, nor exit, but I'm spending all my time while I'm asleep trying, struggling to find a way to escape, a way to get out of the desolate loneliness I barricaded myself in. Each moment is spent dashing and searching, and the pain in my lungs gradually augment, and, and– The black overrides the black, and two juxtapose in a broken, irrational way that screams at me in its broken, fragmented voice. Wouldn't it be grand, if someone just came out to you, with warmth and solidness dripping out of their voice, and said, “It's okay, you'll make it out in the end,” gentle eyes, and a kind smile, “You'll still be you. Maybe, changed, but you'll still be you.” Wouldn't it be amazing?

 

I swear, each instant has me hearing giggles, guffaws, childish explosions of haha's, and I nearly break down right there. The brume is laughing at me, this weather with its keen, ruthless glint in its eye sneers at my veneer of keeping everything afloat, keeping my lungs full of oxygen, keeping my thoughts from shifting to those– Those fragments and shards of me at my nadir, my lowest, lowest point. I have my brain and heart saying it's be okay to break down, to just shut down, to just stop. To, just, stop. But, I ignore the okay, the go-ahead, because my heavy eyes and hands know how greedy and demanding it sounds to just pause. Because, I caused every single thing, because I shouldn't be allowed to have a comfort of anything, because I know that if I admit anything about everything, it becomes more real, and real, and impossible to walk away from. And, I fear that I'll begin to start feeling fake, imaginary, fiction: like a fairy tale. Like I'll become a cautionary tale told by mothers to their misbehaving children in order to frighten them. (The kinds that the young never listen nor heed.) Like I'll simply fade away, vanish, evanesce, disappear.

 

The same spiel, the same pins and needles in my skin, I am never growing. I am regressing into nothingness, back to before the big bang. Back, back, back before anything, before the world, before stars, before everything. But, of course, nothing is simple, nor easy. Contradictions and paradoxes flowing out of every pore and crevice of my body, it feels like it's growing, expanding, exploding. It feels like in every, single moment it gets bigger, bigger, grand like the sun and more. Astronomical as the hole inside me that keeps obliterating, annihilating everything. Like everything just seems much bigger than it's supposed to be, and I don't know what to do about it. And I– I, just, don't know what to do much for anything these days.

 

The rise and fall of the tide. That's how I try to pass it off. It's nothing, insignificant, irrelevant: pay no attention to me. I don't need helping, I don't need saving. You can't fix what's inside of me. The High: I feel the world, and beyond; sharp pains, and never any gains. The Low: I don't feel a single thing; I feel invisible, transparent. Comets whip by, the moon watches, and I just wait. Maybe, my machine broke too. Maybe, I have been breaking down my own walls along too. Maybe, I feel tired, spent, at a loss too. It's hard to tell these days, I feel like a living contradiction.

 

I am not your problem to fix, and I think about how bright and vibrant and vivid and effervescent and precious your entirety is, and how dim and dull and mute and sullen and boring and lacking I am of a person. I poisoned you, and I bring it up again and again to myself, and I never let myself forget and have the thought slip through my mind, because I did this. I caused everything, and ended up corrupting the wholeness of you. I am of broken shards, and erring words. It's my fault.

 

Before, I thought that, maybe, I was like you, or you used to be me, at some point in our lives. But, now? I understand, we were never at sync, we never were on the same thought. We are different, I am flawed, you are a whole person. The searing agony still makes me double over and has my stomach churning and twisting and shrivelling. The pain is almost nothing, but it is everything. It's all I can feel these days, everything is rooted to it. A pang of nausea to my head, a pop of despair in my throat, several upheavals of puke and bile in my mouth leaving a sour note, taste everywhere, everyday.

 

The waters ripple, and I wait for an eternity for a chance of it stilling. But, every breath shakes my world like a earthquake. A rough tumble and jostle that wakes up the keening, crumbling noise inside me that spits out the most vile and desperate of things. A cacophony of off beat, wretched notes leaving my skin prickling with goosebumps and phantom pains of worms wriggling inside me: scouring; searching; scavenging.

 

For now, I lie here waiting, biding my time, for just the tides of the waves—ebbing and flowing—to stop, pause, wait for me instead. So, I can sleep, so I can dream about anything.


End file.
